Review of Honey Lemon Soda

I feel a bit conflicted about this anime. It started off annoying and stayed that way for a long time, towards the end it became more interesting and all in all the ending was good, but could've been done even better. It doesn't nearly make up for how bad the first ~8 episodes were, but recency bias is a thing so I ended up rating it 7 while labeling it with mixed feelings. The main issue with the anime is how one dimensional it was for the most part. We have Ishimori who is a hopeless shy and anxious girl due to *drum roll* bullying inthe past, how original. And of course we have the male lead, Miura, who for some reason decided to look out for her and eventually fall for her too, which is again very original. Not that there's a problem with recycled romance stories, but it has to done well to make it interestin. However Honey Lemon Soda does nothing for the first ~8 episodes besides sending Ishimori into a near endless cycle of fighting her social anxiety and coming out of her shell utilizing common tropes and setbacks. The whole sob story doesn't justify how painfully slow her development was and it doesn't make for a dramatic or deep story at all.

The characters are decent in the grand scheme of things if we can look past Ishimori's annoying level of shyness. Nothing to go crazy about and the characters can be just as annoying as the storytelling sometimes, but I'd say the characters are the only thing that will keep you going forward during the boring early episodes.

The ending and the last few episodes is what salvages the show, even though it wasn't done perfectly either. The way the confession turned out made sense from the characters' standpoints, it was sweet and the confession (or more like the conclusion) stretched out into the entire last episode instead of being a single big moment, which was a good choice and paid off. And just in general the last few episodes where Ishimore picked up the pace and came to terms with her feelings was just a much better experience than the rest of the show.

Also episode 11 deserves its own paragraph. There was a major shift in direction, which didn't really fit the show and it was more like a flop. It was a very artistic episode in terms of direction for sure, it was extremely packed with story development and the pace was way too fast, in that term it felt like a waste how slow the previous episodes were. Despite the different direction not working out, I'm still happy they went with it and gave it a shot, I believe these experiments are a good thing regardless of the result. And honestly if it was done in a different anime, it could've worked out.

The OST was really nice, animation was lacking many times.

Basically the anime is slow and boring for ~8 episodes but the rest of the anime is good, it has a decent payoff.